Electronic communications play a large role in modern life, and this includes any modern business. Thus, it is very important for an application managing computerized database containing information relating to business activities to be able to keep full and up-to-date picture of the electronic communications data pertaining to these activities.
However, this may present a number of challenges, since there are many different internal and external systems used to perform communications: electronic mail (corporate and personal), instant messaging, social communications (such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.), SMS, Web Logs, etc. In a large organization, employees can use a variety of ways to send and receive communications, and it may be problematic to ensure that the communications pertaining to business activities is properly archived in the system managing the company's data and can be readily found and accessed when the need arises.
As of today, the vast majority of data within a customer relationship management (CRM) system is entered by hand. This leads to three major issues. First, the amount of time that it takes a CRM system to become useful is directly proportional to the amount of time it takes to enter in the initial data set. This leads to longer ramp up times and higher initial costs for getting users onto a CRM system. It also leads to a delay in the user's ability to appreciate the usefulness of the CRM system. The second problem is the loss of the relationship aspect of Customer Relationship Management. Most associations of real-time data require manual input. This leads to a data gap between the interactions with a customer, and what is stored in the CRM system. This is compounded with the fact that most companies may go several months without any interactions with a customer at all so that the CRM system and the Company may lose grasp of that relationship. The third problem is when a Company representative is prepping for a call, they need to gather data from various sources (linked-in, google, corporate website, etc. to prepare themselves for that call since the data in their CRM system may very well be out of date, or not exist at all.
There are various existing solutions allowing exporting the data from one system storing the email or other electronic communications data into another, and electronic mail protocols allow for automatic creation of copies of messages sent and received for archival and search. However, these systems have substantial downsides, such as:                1. Operation requires client-side or peer-side software installation: Most of these systems need the user to explicitly install some software, which can depend on the computer platform, operating system and its version, email server software type and configuration, etc. and requires repeated maintenance and attention from a qualified professional. Both installation and maintenance of such a solution may carry a substantial cost both in time and money.        2. Control is user-based and manual: Many of these systems require explicit user-controlled action each time some data is to be copied from one system (such as email storage) to another (such as company business data management application), which leads to dependency on the user to always vigilantly keep both systems up-to-date. If a user is unable to perform needed actions to ensure replication, the data will be inaccessible to the company.        3. Limited support of communication technologies: Many of these systems work only with specific email server or client software. Therefore if the user chooses to perform the same tasks using different software solutions, the system is unable to ensure proper data sharing.        4. Many systems, while efficiently managing one specific type of communication, such as email and email-related information, are frequently unable to relate this information to other business data—such as information about clients, activities, orders—stored in different application.        5. Many of these systems target specifically only single type of electronic communication medium—such as email—and can not easily be extended to target emerging communication channels such as social networks, micro-blogging platforms, SMS communication, and other communication media.        6. Some communication systems perform well only when all communications are performed exclusively through the system. Thus, if a communication arrives through a channel that is not related to the system—such as email sent to a different mailbox or a text message—existing systems are either unable to integrate the information or require substantial work and technical expertise to do it.        7. Some communication systems do not have a way to distinguish between communications relevant to the business or personal data and correlate those business communications to such data while filtering out unrelated communication, which should not be archived since such information is not useful for business purposes. Some communication systems that allow such distinction require the user or supporting stuff to create complex sets of rules to achieve it and constantly maintain these rules to ensure they are up-to-date.        
Thus, it is desirable to provide a system and method that overcomes the limitations of existing systems and it is at least to this end that the disclosure is directed.